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Ordinary Egyptians

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations..................................................................................ixPreface................................................................................................xiNote on Transliteration................................................................................xvii1. Colloquial Egyptian, Media Capitalism, and Nationalism..............................................12. Political Centralization to Cultural Centralization.................................................203. Print Capitalism and the Beginnings of Colloquial Mass Culture, 1870–1882.....................394. New Media: Laughter, Satire, and Song, 1882–1908..............................................615. Media Capitalism: From Mass Culture to Mass Practice, 1907–1919...............................1966. The Egyptian Street: Carnival, Popular Culture, and the 1919 Revolution.............................134Conclusion.............................................................................................167Appendix A: Urbanization and Infrastructure............................................................177Appendix B: Plays and Songs Composed by Sayyid Darwish from 1918 to 1919...............................180Notes..................................................................................................183References.............................................................................................221Index..................................................................................................239

Chapter One

Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture. —Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism If the decoding of power relations depended on full access to the more or less clandestine discourse of subordinate groups, students of power—both historical and contemporary—would face an impasse. We are saved from throwing up our hands in frustration by the fact that the hidden transcript is typically expressed openly—albeit in disguised form. I suggest, along these lines, how we might interpret the rumors, gossip, folktales, songs, gestures, jokes and theater of the powerless as vehicles by which, among other things, they insinuate a critique of power while hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct. —James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance

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In Egypt, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were rapidly replaced with new, alternative concepts of community, which for the first time had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. In this examination of modern Egyptian history, I trace the development of Egyptian national identity from the 1870s until the 1919 Revolution through the lens of popular culture. I seek to highlight and feature the role and importance of previously neglected colloquial Egyptian sources—be they oral, aural, or textual. This approach is crucial to any attempt at capturing the voice of the majority of Egyptians. A second objective is to document the influence of a developing colloquial Egyptian mass culture as a vehicle and forum through which, among other things, "hidden transcripts" of resistance and critiques of colonial and elite authority took place. Third, I engage with some of the theories of nationalism and test their applicability to Egypt and the Arab world. I introduce the concept of media capitalism to expand the historical analysis of Egyptian nationalism beyond print and reading, through the incorporation of audiovisual, sound, and performance media.

Until recently, scholars have almost entirely focused on the role of intellectuals in the formation of modern Egyptian identity. Jamal Mohammed Ahmed, Albert Hourani, Nadav Safran, Charles Wendell, Charles D. Smith, and Donald Malcolm Reid investigated the roots of Egyptian nationalism by examining the cultural influences of European ideas on the Egyptian intelligentsia. Although the theoretical framework of Egyptian nationalism might have been formulated by these intellectuals, without the dissemination and the adoption of nationalist ideas by the masses, such politicized rhetoric remained an abstract notion without widespread resonance. In the last couple of decades, more expansive studies have been conducted by Zachary Lockman, Joel Beinin, Juan Cole, and, later, John Chalcraft, who examined in part the street politics and the economic and political mobilizations of guilds and a growing labor movement. More recently, several innovative studies have documented the literary and journalistic representation and often personification of the nation into "authentic" national archetypes. Eve Troutt Powell has examined the nationalistic "othering" of the Sudanese and Nubians in the Egyptian media. Beth Baron has described the changing personification of Egypt as a woman in Egyptian public monuments and the Egyptian illustrated press. Samah Selim and Michael Ezekiel Gasper have examined the urban intelligentsia's representations of the Egyptian fellahin (peasantry) in novels and the press and the role that these played in the creation of national identity.

The most wide ranging study on early Egyptian nationalism is Israel Gershoni and James P. Jankowski's Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930 (1986). The book's major contribution to the field is its use of new sources and its excellent discussion of the formulation of Egyptian national identity. Gershoni and Jankowski's study, however, neglects several issues that need to be addressed. For instance, despite the title of their work, most of their scholarship examines Egyptian nationalism from the post–World War I era. The critical period from the 1870s, when the nationalist press began to take shape, to 1914 is discussed only in their introduction and is rarely mentioned throughout the remainder of their study. A more comprehensive understanding of the genesis and growth of Egyptian nationalism, however, must begin with an analysis of this "period of preparation," as it is appropriately called by Jamal Mohammed Ahmed. In addition, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs focuses mainly on elite and intellectual-centered conceptions of nationalism, overlooking the important role of colloquial mass culture. Indeed, Gershoni and Jankowski themselves admit in the preface that their book "does not deal with the popular attitudes and opinions of the uneducated Egyptian masses." The relationship and effects of popular culture and mass politics on the development of early Egyptian nationalism remain largely uncharted.

POPULAR CULTURE AND COLLOQUIAL EGYPTIAN

Here and elsewhere in this book I try to historicize and see beyond this currency, straining for a concept that can preserve culture's differentiating functions while conceiving of collective identity as a hybrid, often discontinuous inventive process. Culture is a deeply compromised idea I...